“Your list.”
Jamie actually stepped back. “No.”
“Not getting away from it, old chap. The aunts have decided. We manfully refrained from looking at the names,” Toby said.
“I’m not touching that,” Jamie protested, holding up both hands.
Anthony lunged forward and tucked it into his pocket. “Excellent. Supper now, I think.”
He and Toby wandered off, leaving Jamie with two options. Throw the list away without looking, or look.
The note felt as though it burned through his pocket.
“For pity’s sake,” he muttered. Taking it out, he unfolded the paper and read the three names. When he reached the last, he tore it to shreds and dropped them at his feet. Then he headed for the door. Jamie knew exactly where he was going, and that by the time he reached his bed in the early hours of the morning, he’d be calmer and sporting bruises.
Chapter Three
Alice felt asthough her body had been clenched for the two years since her brother’s death. Charles had been the only person she’d loved without reservation—besides Aunt Gwen—and the only one who had loved her back, even if at the end he had been too broken to show it.
Looking around the Barringtons’ ballroom, Alice wondered how soon she could leave as she had no wish to be here, or to encounter Lord Stafford again. It had been folly to dance with him, and yet she’d wanted desperately to see if he could help her locate Kenneth Jackson.
Revenge is not something to be taken lightly with a man such as he.
He’d spoken those words to her in a deep, solemn voice, and she’d known they’d come from the experience he’d had dealing with Kenneth Jackson.
Alice made a conscious effort to unclench her fists and breathe calmly. She’d stepped back into society in the hope that someone would know something about Jackson. She’d found that someone, but Alice knew it would not be easy to get him to talk to her.
How can I feel so alone surrounded by so many people, she wondered.
The air shimmered with heat, candles flickering in gilt sconces, their flames reflected in the huge mirrors that lined the walls. The scents of orange blossom, rose attar, lavenderwater, and others, mingled with the sharper tang of beeswax polish and sweat in the air. The chatter of a hundred voices rose and fell, punctuated by the scrape of bows against strings as the musicians prepared to play another set. Silk rustled, jewels sparkled, and every guest was looking their best.
She ought to feel part of it. Her parents had loved society events before her mother passed and her father had fled to France, but since losing Charles, and what they’d endured before the end, Alice was a different person.
His life had not been the same since he returned home from Blackwood Hall, where he stayed during his short school years. Alice could still see him that last day he’d been alive. For the first time in a long while, he’d been rational. There had been no anger or need to hurt her for the pain he was suffering. He’d asked her to make him tea to help him sleep. When she returned, his lips were still, his eyes open but empty, and the silence in the room had been louder than any society event. Charles had been dead at his own hand from an overdose of laudanum she hadn’t even known he’d been collecting.
Alice felt like her life had ended that night too. Or rather, she had become someone else entirely. A person desperate for vengeance.
Kenneth Jackson.The name burned inside her, etched into her memory by the pages of Charles’s diary, which she’d found when she had gone through his things. Page after page of rambling pain, always circling back to that man. If she thought too long on what had happened inside Blackwood Hall, she felt ill. To know her beloved brother had suffered the horrors he had, made her alternate between rage and weeping.
She’d known he’d suffered, as some of his story had come out, but not all—not the worst parts, and not the name of the man who ultimately had been responsible.
A ripple of laughter pulled her back from her memories, and her eyes went to the dance floor, but did not see the tall figure of Lord Stafford.
Alice was constantly hearing whispers about how handsome and charming he was. But she also knew there was another side to the marquess.
He didn’t care overly what society thought of him according to her aunt, who was a font of knowledge when it came to the ton. Lord Stafford didn’t step over the invisible line into impropriety, or that anyone knew of, but her aunt said he was close to it a time or two. Aunt Gwen said he had a rakish air to him, and Alice had to agree. There was something a little wild about that man.
She had heard the emotion in his words the night she’d sat before him on his horse. The night she’d asked if Kenneth Jackson was his housemaster too. Something dark and dangerous had been in his gaze when she’d looked at him. Had he too lived through what Charles had not survived? It now seemed likely that was indeed the case after the two conversations she’d recently had with him. Unlike her brother, however, it had not affected his mind, or was he just better at hiding it?
Could he help her find answers to the questions she had? Help her find Jackson?
“Alice!”
The hiss sliced through the hum of conversation, startling her out of her thoughts. She turned, scanning the room.
There, half-hidden behind a potted palm, two familiar faces grinned at her.
“Why on earth are you whispering at me from behind a plant?” Alice asked, eyebrows arching.
